Coffee
by Maureen Painted Green
Summary: If he were to write their story, coffee would always be the catalyst.
1. Coffee

**A/N:** This story takes place approximately 6 months after the events of Kill Shot. Possible spoilers for Season 4 in later chapters, but this chapter includes nothing after the Season 3 finale. For the purposes of this story, Alexis has already left the Castle nest and is happily entrenched in her collegiate textbooks – hopefully at Stanford. No Ashley, though, because really – she's too good for him.

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><p>It's become almost biological at this point, the impulse to vacate her chair at the precinct every evening at exactly 7:12 PM. She's always been a creature of habit, and the bold-faced numerals stare knowingly at her from her father's watch on her arm. Sighing quietly, and to no one in particular (anyone in particular she might have sighed to had left hours ago), she rose from her chair, taking care to press the power button on her desktop monitor before grabbing her coat. Stopping in the break room, she remembers the paper bag Castle had pressed into her hand that morning with a conspiratorial grin. Cheesecake, he'd told her. Pumpkin and cinnamon. With a maple glaze, she remembers, grinning wolfishly as she remembers the childlike pride with which he had presented it to her. Tonight, the cheesecake would be her excuse, but the ritual would be the same as ever.<p>

She would arrive home to a darkened apartment, the late fall sun having already tired, a summer's worth of endless days finally catching up to themselves – November in New York. Her coat would be abandoned quickly, draped over the arm of the couch or tossed on the pile of paperwork that littered the kitchen table. Before even turning on the lights, she would make her way over to jar where she kept her temporary high. Grinding the beans herself every evening, she would begin to brew the coffee. It was her constant, her ritual. _Rituals were important,_ she admitted silently to herself. _They kept you sane._ Some days, she'd fight the ritual, fight the need behind it, fight against her own weakness – but as soon as she walked through her own front door, whatever weak arguments she'd cooked up began to fail. This daily ceremony – it had become something of an inevitability.

As soon as the last few drips fell, she was ready, mug in hand. Wrapping her slender fingers around the still too-hot ceramic, she stood silently at the window, reluctantly allowing her mind to wander. It was the only part of her day that she permitted herself to slip into the twisting folds of her memories – memories that sometimes felt as dark as the coffee she was drinking. She remembered the love and innocence of a childhood taken from her far too early, remembered the murder of her mother, the senselessness of the act, and the hopelessness she'd felt at her own inability to catch those responsible. She allowed herself to burrow deep into her own mind as she gazed out into the murky night, lost in reverie.

Something was missing in her life. Something had been missing for a long time, but she'd never been aware of its absence before. She didn't have that luxury now. He'd stormed into her life with his unlikely explanations and bizarre rationalizations, his incessant need to make life more like his novels, and in the process, he'd disrupted that balance, that equilibrium – that comfort of unawareness. If he'd never walked through the doors of the twelfth, never occupied that single chair beside her desk – she was sure she'd never have missed it. She could have lost herself in her work and allowed the world to pass her by. She could have blithely written off the living to give voice to the dead, continued the endless string of nowhere relationships with men she didn't love. And though she would always have known that she wasn't happy, she would never have seen a reason why she should or could be. It was only in these moments, watching the rain fall in sheets on the pavement outside as she sipped her communion of black coffee, that she admitted to herself that for the first time she could remember, she was aware of a great emptiness in her life. This was the true reason for the coffee – it bridged the gap between the truth that she felt sure existed, so close she could almost touch it – and the seemingly impassable chasm that separated her from it.

The truth – if only she knew it, she might finally be able to move on. Might even invite Castle inside, rather than barely tolerating his occasionally successful attempts to insinuate himself into her apartment, into her life. The dread didn't come from knowing that she hadn't yet found this truth, but rather from the feeling of impending certainty that soon she would have a decision to make, with or without it. The eleventh hour was upon her – Kate Beckett was running out of time, running from questions she still wasn't sure she wanted answers to.

But time – she knew enough now to know that time waited for no one. Time had finally come to collect its bounty from her, to make good on the deal with the devil she'd made so long ago. It was time to face up to the inevitable, imperishable truths that had finally caught up with her. She stood now at a crossroads between life and death – and she knew now that the line she had been walking between the two could be no more. She'd been running scared from the idea of really living for so long that she'd strayed dangerously close to the alternative. She was so close now – to answers, to her mother's murderer – and in her haste to get here, she hadn't realized how close she'd come to something else entirely. Sunshine-filled life called out to her with a voice that sounded suspiciously like Richard Castle's, teasing her with visions of a future as a wife, a mother, part of a family – perfect happiness. She could give up this chase – she could have it all, but a part of her still wondered – could she ever let it go? Could she knowingly walk away from the truth of her mother's murder? She knew the answer before she even asked the question.

No. She couldn't – this had started as a mission, but it had become her entire life, everything that she was. A silent tear slipped down her cheek as she thought bitterly of the life she might have had in another, better world.

This was the indulgence she allowed herself. She couldn't let Castle know that she loved him – he'd do everything in his power to stop her, and in her weakness, she would let him. But she could allow herself this one moment each night to grieve for a life which had never been, could never have been, but which had felt more real to her than even the ring around her neck.

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><p><strong>AN:** _To be continued..._


	2. Conflict

**A/N: **Thank you all for reading and following and for your great feedback! This next chapter is a little lighter, but the rest of the story should vacillate somewhere between the first two. No spoilers for anything in this chapter (for those of you that care as deeply as I do about remaining unspoiled). Happy reading!

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><p>"<em>Giselle: You were in love.<br>__Robert: Yeah. That was the problem." –Enchanted_

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><p>"Good morning, my dear Detective Beckett!" She tries to be annoyed with his overly cheery entrance, but his genuine smile gets the better of her. The coffee cup he extends in her direction doesn't hurt either.<p>

"Morning, Castle." She says, trying to hide the hint of a smile playing across her delicate features. He sees it anyway – he's become far too adept at reading the subtleties of her expression. She curses herself internally for her own weakness – he's been here less than five minutes, and already, he's deep under her skin. _The important thing_, she muses, _is not to give him the satisfaction of knowing it._

"What are we up to today? Searches and seizures? Scintillating arrests of powerful men? Murder most foul?" She'll never admit it, but his childlike exuberance for their work is one of his most endearing qualities – often, it fuels her push for the answer.

"Nope. Just paperwork." She is ice woman. She has a heart of stone. She cannot be melted or moved, even by him.

"Hmmm…well…" He inches toward the door, realizing the underlying significance of the stacks and stacks of paper on her desk. "You don't really need me here, so…"

"Don't even think about it, Castle." There is a hint of a smirk in her tone. _Actually_, Castle decides, _it's a good deal more than a hint._ She's like the principal. A very, very sexy principal. Oh God, she was gonna be the death of him. "We agreed, remember? Partners means you're in for the long haul – if you want the murders and the arrests, you've gotta suffer through the paperwork too." He wants to wipe that smirk right off her face. He wants to tell her what she can do with her paperwork. He wants to drag her out of the precinct then and there, wrench her head out of her case files and make her see there's a whole world waiting. God, he wants her.

He responds to her casual ribbing with a surprising lack of complaint. Of course he'll help with the paperwork, odious and distasteful as he finds it – she has him wrapped around her little finger, and she knows it. Plopping down in the chair beside her desk, he grabs a case file of his own to flip through. With a barely-concealed grin, he steals the pen from her right hand and begins to work.

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><p>She doesn't know how it started, but somehow, this day of paperwork has turned into a sport of one-upsmanship between the two of them. If she didn't know better, she would describe it as a game of bizarre, flirtational chicken. All she knows is that it's become a contest, and Kate Beckett has never been one to back down from competition. She wants to win.<p>

It started when he took his first coffee break – he made a quick trip to the break room, and, after several minutes of fiddling with his precious espresso machine, returned with lattes for the both of them. In the process of handing her a coffee and sitting down, he'd somehow managed to scoot his chair about a foot closer to her, causing their elbows to touch every time either of them wrote a note in a case file.

He did the same the next two times he got up; by his fourth jaunt around the bullpen, his chair was practically underneath hers, their legs flush against each other underneath her desk, in contact from her knee to thigh. _And_, she realized, somewhere between amusement and annoyance, _he kept "accidentally" brushing her foot with his._ Never one to be outdone, Beckett decided that it was her turn to up the ante – two could play at this game. Her face the ultimate mask of professionalism, she leaned across his body and began making notes in _his_ case file. The look of shock on his face was entirely worth whatever conversation she knew she would eventually have to avoid about it.

Castle was delighted with the turn of events that his childlike attempts to liven up a day of paperwork had created. As he reluctantly extracted himself from the close proximity of his partner to make a lunch run, his ingenious mind was already working on its next move. When he returned with sandwiches from the deli around the corner, Beckett was surprised and suspicious that he merely returned to his previous position without upping the ante. He enjoyed making her squirm, enjoyed the feeling of her questioning eyes flicking up from her paperwork every so often, when she thought he wasn't paying attention, wondering what he was going to do next. She was like a caged animal, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He let her stew for the better part of an hour, waiting until she dropped her guard to make his next move. _It was a game of strategy and patience_, he smirked, _and of those two qualities, he was a master._ With carefully affected nonchalance, Castle dutifully removed all the yellow Post-It notes from the paper in front of him, case notes he'd painstakingly transcribed directly into the file. Casually and slowly, he wadded them up into a ball, which he then transferred into his right hand. Beckett continued scribbling in her own file, oblivious to his movements.

It came as quite a shock to the detective when she paused in her writing to recall the date of a particular search warrant and discovered that her partner's arm had been steadily inching around her waist. Castle was the picture of nonchalance as his right hand wrapped farther around her midsection, crossing over her entire body. She turned to him, prepared to resort to physical violence, when he casually tossed the ball of Post-It notes he'd been holding into the trashcan on her other side. Realizing she'd been had, she returned silently to her work, vowing to get even. To her side, Castle retracted his arm with barely-concealed glee and went back to writing. Over the course of the next hour, he threw away 5 more Post-It balls in exactly the same way.

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><p>Two hours later, the war continued. A brief armistice had been silently called when Captain Gates had gone on her daily inspection of the bullpen, stalking around the large room like a lioness on the prowl. Castle had edged away from her then, regaining some semblance of a professional distance, but his hand had remained at her waist, tickling silently, in an attempt to further skew her equilibrium in the overbearing presence of her boss. Shortly after Gates' return to her office, Kate excused herself to the break room, where she busied herself with a cup of coffee. Apparently Castle was feeling bolder – he appeared in the room moments later, reaching his arms around her to get the creamer, effectively pinning her against the counter. He added some to her coffee as well, stirring in her usual 2 sugars simultaneously. She smiled, leaning back into his arms in spite of herself. <em>It was almost sweet of him.<em>

"Sorry, sweetheart," he whispered into her ear, "We haven't got time for anything else." _Almost._

"Star Wars." She retorted. "Nice." He returned to the bullpen; she lingered in the break room, ostensibly gathering her thoughts as she plotted her retaliation.

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><p>Castle was deeply immersed in the file of a case they'd closed the previous week when Beckett finally emerged from the break room. Walking over towards her desk, she took a long sip from the coffee mug in her hands. She stalled for a moment behind Castle, scanning the file he was working on over his shoulder. Then, as naturally as she would if she were sitting in her own swivel chair, she positioned herself on Castle's lap. Ignoring the stunned expression on her partner's face, she purloined his pen (<em>the same pen he'd stolen from her earlier<em>, she noted) and continued blandly writing notes in a case file. After recovering from his shell shock, Castle picked up his own case file off the corner of her desk. Pen poised to write, he brushed back her hair and whispered softly in her ear,

"You think you've won, don't you?" Several minutes passed in companionable silence, until Beckett felt Castle's unoccupied left arm snake around her waist, holding her closer. As unconsciously as he'd held her, she snuggled closer to the heat of his body, letting her tired muscles relax into the comfort of his capable arms. Kate smirked to herself silently. She didn't think she'd won. _She knew she had._

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><p>"Beckett, Castle!" At Esposito's yell, both looked up, confused at the half-shocked, half-amused look on his face. "Didn't realize I was interrupting, you two." He recovered, looking like the cat that ate the proverbial canary as Beckett and Castle abruptly realized that they were, in fact, still occupying the same chair.<p>

"You weren't…we were just…" A red-cheeked Beckett looked desperately at Castle for help explaining the unusual circumstance Espo had caught them in, but his only response was to smirk and tighten the arm that held her to him. She struggled valiantly to get away, finally succeeding by pinching his ear until he relinquished his hold on her long enough for her to escape.

"That, Detective," He said, rubbing his wounded ear (_which probably hurt significantly less than his wounded pride_, she decided), "Was not fighting fair."

"Who said anything about fair?" She replied, almost wistfully. He saw it the second it happened – reality snapped back into place, like the lowering of a guillotine. _Exactly, _his heart remarked, _like a guillotine._ "What have we got, Espo?" Her next question was pure professionalism. Castle mourned the change as if it were a great personal loss.

"39th and Lex, Detective. We've got a body."

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><p><em>To be continued…<em>


End file.
